About 10 years ago I started a personal Web page at Geocities. The site grew as I shared information, including our family tree, with other people. Eventually Geocities was taken over by Yahoo, and yesterday, suddenly and without warning, Yahoo blocked access to my web pages, and to my e-mail address (hayesstw@yahoo.com)and everything else linked to that Yahoo ID.

The implication is that I had somehow violated their terms of service. I’m not sure how I might have done that, but the only thing I can think of is that someone sent me one of those address update thingies, through a web site called Plaxo. I thought I would try out the Plaxo thing — it’s a sort of on-line address book, like the one Yahoo has, but with automatic updating. It had an option to import my Yahoo address book, so I did that, and the next thing I knew was that my Yahoo membership was terminated.

So the problem seems to be one of these turf wars between Internet companies. I can’t think of what else it might be.

One of the things affected was a Growdon/Growden family mailing list on YahooGroups, which I will no longer be able to maintain, and I’m not sure how much longer I’ll have access to it.

But for the moment this blog is still a contact point, thought a blog is a poor substitute for a mailing list.